Adam O'Riordan's fleshy first book

Writing in the Guardian, Sarah Crown finds “preternatural maturity” in debut poet Adam O’Riordan, whose book “In the Flesh” focuses on lost histories and impossible futures. One poem meditates on Manchester’s past; another speculates on what might have been: “a new father locks eyes with a stranger ‘and a lifetime unfolds’ in the moment before ’she disappears again.’”

Crown describes raptly the “handful of feverish poems on sex.”

In one, “Cheat”, “with him away” (absence again) the speaker “sunk with the fluke of your hips, / our movements incessant as a distaff and spindle”. In another two food and sex intermingle, most memorably in the mixing of a bloody mary.

Wait—how do they intermingle? Can we learn to make that cocktail? Perhaps we’ll need to buy the book.